Tag Archives: Chuck Schumer

Following the announcement that Israel is facing a possible International Criminal Court war crimes probe over its 2014 assault on Gaza, Democracy Now! invited Finkelstein into their studio to give an extended interview.

Click here to watch the first section of the interview and read the full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.

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Norman Finkelstein is the son of Holocaust survivors. A leading scholar on Israel-Palestine and veteran political activist, Finkelstein is the author of many books, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Human Suffering and Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End. His latest book is titled Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.

The full interview lasts more than 90 minutes and was broadcast in two parts [January 10th and 19th] – it is embedded below with all sections kept in the original sequence. For the purposes of clarity, however, I have decided to republish a selection of what Finkelstein said under three separate headings: criticisms of human rights organisations, of the UN and Ban Ki-moon in particular, and of recent US administrations. For the same reason, sections from the interview are cut and pasted not always in the original sequence. I very much encourage readers to watch to the full interview.

Click here to watch the second section of the interview and read the full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.

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The big lies

The Big Lie about Gaza is that it’s an aggressor, that Gaza is aggressing against Israel, and Israel is reacting in self-defense. It’s a double lie. The first lie is, most of the Israeli attacks on Gaza don’t even have anything to do with Gaza. So, if you take Operation Cast Lead, in 2008, ’09, why did Israel attack Gaza? Not because of Gaza. Not because of anything Gaza did. The Israelis were very honest. This is revenge for Lebanon. In 2006, Israel suffered a major defeat in Lebanon against the Hezbollah, the Party of God. And then Israelis began to panic. They’re losing what they call their deterrence capacity. And their deterrence capacity simply means—it’s a fancy, technical term for the Arabs’ fear of us. […]

The second big lie is, what does Gaza consist of. When you read the official reports, even when you read the human rights reports, they talk about this big arsenal of weapons that Hamas has accumulated. Number one, how do you know how many weapons they have? If you knew how many weapons they had—have, then you must know where they are. And if you know where they are, then Israel would preemptively strike. If it’s not preemptively struck, it’s because it doesn’t know anything about the weapons. Israel plucks numbers out of thin air, and then all the official media, and even the critical human rights organizations, repeat these numbers. They talk about Grad missiles and Fajr missiles.

What is Gaza? What are its weapons? What is its arsenal? Let’s take the last attack. We have exactly—we know exactly how much damage was done by these weapons. There were 5,000 so-called rockets and 2,000 mortars fired at—mortar shells fired at Israel. So, altogether, that’s 7,000 projectiles. You know the damage done? Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it had a diary, listing all the damage done each day. Five thousands rockets, 2,000 mortar shells. One house was destroyed. One house. How is it possible that 5,000 rockets and 2,000 mortar shells can only destroy one house? Because they’re not rockets. They’re fireworks. They’re enhanced fireworks.

Click here to watch the third section of the interview and read the full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.

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On justifications for the 2014 military offensive

Well, Benjamin Netanyahu says two things: Number one, Israel had no option, and, number two, that it used the minimum amount of force. Well, let’s look quickly at those two points.

Point number one, everybody agreed that the reason they went—once the fighting began, Hamas had one goal. The goal was to end the siege of Gaza, to lift the siege. Under international law, that siege is illegal. It constitutes collective punishment, which is illegal under international law. The siege has been condemned by everybody in the international community. He had an option. He didn’t have to use force. He simply had to lift the siege. And then there wouldn’t have been a conflict with Gaza.

Number two, he claims he used minimum force. There’s a lot to say about that. You can decide for yourself whether it’s minimum force when Israel leveled 18,000 homes. How many Israeli homes were leveled? One. Israel killed 550 children. How many Israeli children were killed? One. Now, you might say, “Well, that’s because Israel has a sophisticated civil defense system, or Israel has Iron Dome.” I won’t go into that; I don’t have time now. But there’s a simple test. The test is: What did the Israeli combatants themselves see? What did they themselves say?

We have the documentation, a report put out by the Israeli ex-service—ex-combatant organization, Breaking the Silence. It’s about 110 pages. You couldn’t believe it. You know, I’ll tell you, Amy, I still remember when I was reading it. I was in Turkey. I was going to a book festival. I was sitting in the back of a car and reading these descriptions of what the soldiers did. My skin was crawling. I was like shaking. Soldier after soldier after soldier. Now, bear in mind, you want to say they’re partisan, the soldiers? Read the testimonies. They’re not contrite. They’re not remorseful. They’re just describing what happened. There’s no contrition. These aren’t lefties, supporters of BDS. What do they describe? One after another after another says, “Our orders were shoot to kill anything that moves and anything that doesn’t move.” One after another after another says, “Israel used insane amounts of firepower in Gaza. Israel used lunatic amounts of firepower in Gaza.”

Click here to watch the final section of the first part of the interview and read the full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.

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Human rights organisations

In my opinion, Israel has a problem, has always had a problem. The problem is, it keeps getting bad press, because when it keeps carrying out these massacres or these shootings, it gets bad press. And so, obviously, what’s the solution? Eliminate the press, eliminate the witnesses. So, during Operation Cast Lead in 2008, ’09, they prevented any reporters from coming in. So, for three weeks, it was a free-for-all. Then, after Operation Protective Edge, they didn’t let any human rights organizations in, so they couldn’t see what was the damage done. So, then the human rights organizations, what they did was, in my opinion, crazy. They said, “If Israel doesn’t let us in, we have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they didn’t commit the war crime.” But that just incentivizes Israel not to let human rights organizations in. You get an agnostic verdict rather than a guilty verdict. […]

There were no human rights reports. Human Rights Watch published—for Operation Cast Lead in 2008, ’09, it published seven quite substantial reports. After Operation Protective Edge, it published one tiny report, one tiny report of 15 pages. Amnesty International was the only major human rights organization that published major reports, but they were all whitewashes of Israel. They were a disgrace. I go through them systematically. The Amnesty chapter is one of the longest chapters in the book. Just going through it, as I said, Gaza is a big lie composed of tiny lies.

Blame on both sides? Look at the numbers…

And the main propaganda, even—or especially by the human rights organizations, is the pretense that there’s blame on both sides, there’s blame—there’s death and destruction on both sides. But when you look at the numbers, I mean, it’s just ridiculous to put them in the same category. I gave you a chart, you know, to illustrate the numbers in Operation Protective Edge. Civilians killed, roughly 1,600—1,600 to six, civilians killed. Houses destroyed, 18,000 to one. Children killed, 550 to one. You go down the list. How can you create balance out of a balance sheet like that? You know? Out of a grotesquely imbalanced balance sheet like that? And what the human rights organizations do is they simply inflate what happened on the Israeli. So, for example, you take Amnesty International. One child was killed. One child was killed. They describe the child’s death over two pages. So, you say, “OK, you know, it’s a child’s death. What’s wrong with two pages?” Well, then let’s have balance. Five hundred fifty Palestinian children were killed. Did you give that 1,100 pages? […]

You take Operation Protective Edge. Again, there is no evidence. I’ve read through all the human rights reports. None of them finds any evidence of human shielding. What they do claim they find is—there’s a technical term under international law that when you’re engaging in a military combat, you have to take feasible precautions to protect civilians, and that if you fighting in the vicinity of civilians, you are then guilty of a violation of international law. It’s not a war crime. It’s a violation of international law. They claim Hamas fired or attacked Israel in the vicinity of civilians, so is guilty of not taking all feasible precautions, which is different than human shielding, which is a conscious practice of, as it were, inserting a human being between you and the enemy, for which there’s no evidence. […]

But then, Amnesty says something outrageous—in my opinion, outrageous. You know what it says? It says that Hamas should go to open areas and fight in the open areas of Gaza. Now, on its face, that might sound reasonable, except for, number one, there are very few open areas in Gaza; number two, the law does not say you have to do that. The law does not say you have to relocate all your troops in an open area. But then, number three, Gaza is not occupied internally by Israel. Gaza is surrounded by Israel, and it’s an occupation that is executed externally. So, here’s the problem. […]

Now, international law—according to these human rights organizations, they all say all of Hamas’s weapons are illegal under international law, because they’re indiscriminate. The law is, you can’t use indiscriminate weapons. Hamas’s weapons are very primitive, to say the least. So, international law says its so-called rockets are illegal, its so-called mortar shells—its mortar shells are illegal. Now, what are you left with? Amnesty says to Hamas, “You have to go into an open space, but you can’t use any of your weapons.” But if you can’t use any of your weapons, because they’re indiscriminate, how do you defeat an externally controlled occupation? The only thing Amnesty didn’t tell them to do was to line up like ducks and let the Israeli airplane come in and mow them down.

Now, you might smile at that, but that’s literally—that’s where you’re left. That’s where you’re left, with what these human rights organizations are saying. It’s not to defend Hamas. It’s just to look at the law objectively, rationally, and ask yourself, “Is what—are what the human rights organizations saying fair? Is it true?” All the human rights organizations, they’ll always say Israel used disproportionate force. They’ll say Israel used indiscriminate force.

But there’s one thing they’ll never say. You know what they’ll never say? Israel targeted the civilians. Because that’s the no-no. You see, under international law, indiscriminate attacks are war crimes. Disproportionate attacks are war crimes. Targeting civilians are war crimes. That’s the law. But then there’s public opinion. Public opinion, it’s willing to turn a blind eye to disproportionate attacks. Actually, how can you even prove an attack is disproportionate? It’s almost impossible. They’ll even say, yeah, indiscriminate attacks, because it’s hard to separate civilians from soldiers. The one thing public opinion won’t tolerate is the targeted attack on civilians. That’s exactly what Israel does in every one of its massacres, and that’s exactly the thing that the human rights organizations—now, not during Operation Cast Lead, now, after the Goldstone debacle—that’s the one thing they all shy away from. They don’t want to say Israel targets civilians. […]

Israel is always targeting children. You have so many cases, like you have children playing on a roof. Right? A drone comes in. Human Rights Watch says—its report was called “Precisely Wrong,” after Operation Protective Edge—excuse me, Operation Cast Lead. The drone comes in. Human rights report says the drone can see very clearly what it’s targeting. The drone, it could—up to the very last minute, very last minute, it could divert. Goes right for the kids.

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UN and Ban Ki-moon

In 2014 there was a more notorious incident when an Israeli gunboat targeted a group of children playing games on a beach. The murders were carried out directly in front of a hotel packed with reporters.

So, what does the U.N. Human Rights Council report say, the one by Mary McGowan Davis? “Israel didn’t take all feasible precautions.” All feasible precautions? There was no battle going on. There was no—there was no combat. There were only children there. “We don’t know why Israel mistook these children for militants.” […]

Yeah, when [Ban Ki-moon] was U.N. secretary-general, he does all the bidding for the United States when it comes to Israel-Palestine. I don’t want to go through—I can’t go through this whole sordid record, but the—Israel attacked seven U.N. shelters, which were housing civilians during Operation Protective Edge. And then, on August 3rd, finally, Ban Ki-moon has to say something. And he says, “This is a disgrace, this is outrageous, attacking civilian shelters.” August 3rd, Obama, he no longer has a fig leaf. Ban Ki-moon backed out.

And now—and now Obama is alone on the world stage. So, August 3rd, the same day, Obama attacks Israel for the shelters, bombing the shelters. And now, Netanyahu, the day before, August 2nd, he says, “I’m not leaving Gaza.” After Obama says, “You can’t do this,” he leaves. Same day, August 3rd. Now, it is true, it did go on for another three weeks. It went on for another three weeks because you entered into the negotiation period, where Israel always brings in its most force to try to extract the best terms.

Click here to watch part two of the interview and read the full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.

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US administrations past and present

On the bipartisan support for Israel

Well, it’s a little complicated question, how U.S.-Israeli policy works. But in general, you could say, when major U.S. national interests are at stake, the Israel lobby has very little power. We saw that, for example, during the negotiations over the agreement with Iran. That was a major U.S. international interest. The lobby was dead set against it. Netanyahu was dead set against it. But the agreement went through. And many of Israel’s strongest supporters—Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, the whole gang—they supported the agreement.

But when a major U.S. interest is not at stake, the lobby is quite powerful. So you take, in this particular case, it was clear the Saudis, which is a U.S. major interest, didn’t care what the U.S. did with Jerusalem. They gave the green light: “If you want to give it to Israel, that’s fine with us. We don’t care.” So, no U.S. natural interest is at stake, and so Trump does what anybody does: He rewards his donors. In this case, it was Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, who was strongly supporting the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.

But we have to bear in mind, it wasn’t just Trump. You know, sometimes the media wants to pile up on Trump. And they forget it’s not just Trump. Charles Schumer, the current Senate minority leader, Schumer was constantly attacking Trump, right after he got elected: “Why aren’t you recognizing Jerusalem as the undivided capital?” When Trump did recognize it, Schumer, Charles Schumer, he said, “He did it because of me. I was the one that urged him to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.” So that’s the Senate minority leader speaking. And for the same reason—if you look at Schumer’s money, he gets it mostly from conservative, right-wing Jews and from Wall Street, the same sources of income as Trump, the same streams of income.

And on these questions, a lot of the Democrats, including Schumer—or especially Schumer, I should say—are worse than Trump. So, for example, after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010, when Israel killed the passengers aboard the humanitarian vessel, the Mavi Marmara, killed 10 passengers, Charles Schumer, he went before a group of Orthodox Jews, and he said, “The people of Gaza voted for Hamas. They voted for Hamas, and therefore economic strangulation is the way to go.” Now, bear in mind what that means. We’re talking about a population, more than half of which are children, who are living under a medieval siege. And what he’s effectively saying is we should continue starving them, until they vote or get rid of Hamas. Now, what do you say about something like that?

Under Obama

Look, the Obama administration was—played a really wretched role in all this. Let’s just take the obvious examples. Operation Cast Lead, it ends on January 17th. Now, remember, Obama was elected in November 2008. Operation Cast Lead ends January 17th, 2009. Obama didn’t say anything after he was elected. Do you know why it ends January 17th? Because Obama signals to the Israeli government, “Don’t mess up my inauguration, January 20th. I don’t want any distractions. You’ve got to end the operation.” That’s why they ended.

Now, you go to Operation Protective Edge, 2014. Every day, Obama or one of his officials said, “Israel has the right to protect itself. Israel has the right to protect itself,” as Israel is leveling Gaza. There was no—actually, there was no comparison between Protective Edge and Cast Lead. It was so much worse.

Under Trump

They’re using this moment—with Trump in power, they’re using this moment to try to eliminate as many witnesses as they can, keep everybody out. They want to do to the West Bank what they did to Gaza. It’s very hard for an outsider to get into Gaza. And now, the Israelis are carrying on in a very brazen way—the land grabs, the merciless killings of civilians, the brutal killings of civilians. And so, they want to clear the field of any witnesses. And they’re using the Trump presidency as a moment to seal off Gaza from any—excuse me, seal off the West Bank from any potentially hostile witnesses, to turn the West Bank into what they turned Gaza into. It’s hermetically sealed. There’s no way to witness the crimes as they unfold in real time.

And on the threat of the U.S. cutting off millions of dollars to UNRWA

First of all, you have to bear in mind that 70 percent of Palestinians in Gaza—let’s just call them Gazans—70 percent of Gazans are classified as refugees. That means, technically, actual refugees and children of refugees. But under the categorization used in Gaza, they’re all classified as refugees. So that’s 70 percent. Secondly, half of Gaza’s population, or slightly more, are children. And so you have this overwhelmingly refugee child population, and they rely overwhelmingly on UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

UNRWA is financed between 25 and 30 percent by the United States, and that comes to about $300 million a year. And so, the threat of cutting the money to UNRWA would be—it would be devastating for an already devastated population, overwhelmingly children. Nonetheless, I would like to keep things in proportion. So, it would be a catastrophe, no doubt about it, if UNRWA is defunded by the United States. However, let’s look at the numbers. We’re talking about $300 million annually. Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, he paid $500 million for a yacht. That would have covered all of UNRWA’s expenses, American—the American portion, for more than a year. He paid $450 million for a da Vinci painting. That would have covered all U.S. expenses, again, for more than a year. He paid $300 million for a house in Versailles. That would have covered all the U.N. expense—UNRWA expenses by the United States. And God only knows how much money he paid for Tom Friedman’s column in The New York Times.

Here is an upload to compliment the previous article – an addition I would have incorporated if I had come across it sooner.

On January 11th, Chris Hedges was interviewed on RT’s Watching the Hawks where he discussed why Clinton lost the election, how Chuck Schumer epitomises everything wrong with the Democratic Party, and the ways in which Trump will most likely be influenced by the ‘deep state’:

[from 5:50 mins] But what will be interesting is watching the ‘deep state’ which runs everything – Exxon Mobil, Raytheon, Goldman Sachs – And we see it in terms of Trump appointments. [What will be interesting is] watching them turn Trump.

“The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction.” 1 — Mike Lofgren

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On February 14th, Dennis Kucinich, former Democrat Representative from Ohio and twice candidate for Democratic nomination for President, gave an extremely frank interview on Fox News calling for Americans to “wake up” in light of the leaked revelations that forced the resignation of Gen. Michael Flynn as President Trump’s National Security Advisor.

Here is an overview of what Kucinich said:

“Now what’s at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence community to upend any positive relationship between the US and Russia… The American people have to know that there’s a game going inside the intelligence community where there are those who want to separate the US from Russia in a way that would reignite the Cold War. That’s what’s at the bottom of all this…

“What’s going on in the intelligence community with this new president is unprecedented. They’re making every effort to offend him. Who knows what the truth is anymore. This is like the electronic version of Mad magazine: spy versus spy…

“There’s something wrong going on here in the intelligence community. I want to remind the viewers… that in the closing months of the Obama administration they put together a deal with Russia to create peace in Syria. A few days later, a military strike in Syria killed a hundred Syrian soldiers and that ended the agreement. What happened is inside the intelligence and the Pentagon there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made.

“This is like ‘deep state’. This is like some kind of a spy novel. But it’s real and the American people have to understand that a game is being played with the security of our country.

“This isn’t about whether you’re for or against Donald Trump. Hello! This is about whether or not the American people are bystanders in a power play inside the intelligence community the outcome of which could determine our relationship with Russia and whether or not billions of dollars are going to be spent in a new Cold War.”

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Now before offering my own broader thoughts below, I wish first to direct readers’ attention to an excellent recent article by Mike Whitney that lays out the background details and thereby better contextualises the ongoing ‘deep state’ campaign against the Trump administration. Here are just the opening paragraphs which usefully provide a flavour of Whitney’s standpoint:

The New York Times is currently engaged in one of its most ambitious projects: Removing a sitting president from office. In fact, Times columnist Nicolas Kristof even said as much in a recent article titled “How Can We Get Rid of Trump?”

Frankly, it’s an idea that I find attractive, mainly because I think Trump’s views on immigration, the environment, human rights, civil liberties and deregulation are so uniformly horrible, they could destroy the country. But the Times objections are different from my own. The reason the Times wants Trump removed is because Trump wants to normalize relations with Russia which threatens to undermine Washington’s effort to project US power deeper into Central Asia.

Trump’s decision to normalize relations with Moscow poses a direct threat to Washington’s broader imperial strategy to control China’s growth, topple Putin, spread military bases across Central Asia, implement trade agreements that maintain the dominant role of western-owned mega-corporations, and derail attempts by Russia and China to link the wealthy EU to Asia by expanding the web of pipeline corridors and high-speed rail that will draw the continents closer together creating the largest and most populous free trade zone the world has ever seen.

This is what the US foreign policy establishment and, by inclusion, the Times are trying to avoid at all cost. The economic integration of Asia and Europe must be blocked to preserve Washington’s hegemonic grip on world power. That’s the whole deal in a nutshell.

So don’t be fooled, the Times doesn’t care any more [sic] about the suffering of immigrant families who have been victimized by Trump’s extremist policies than they do about the three million refugees that have fled America’s wars in Libya and Syria. The fact that the Times continues to mischaracterize this vast human exodus as some sort of natural disaster instead of the predictable spillover from persistent US aggression, just confirms the fact that the Times is not a reliable source of unbiased information at all. It is a political publication that crafts a political narrative reflecting the views of politically-minded elites whose strategic objectives cannot be achieved without more brainwashing, more coercion and more war.2

Click here to read Mike Whitney’s full article entitled “Liberals Beware: Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas”.

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Deep state vs. Trump State

“But quite frankly there is an outside source which we refer to as the ‘deep state’ or the ‘shadow government’. There is a lot of influence by people which are actually more powerful than our government itself [or] our president” 3 — Ron Paul (shortly after Trump was elected)

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.” 4

The threat to the newly elected Commander-in-Chief of the United States and ‘leader of the free world’ is plain. In fact, how could it be any plainer? Think you’re in charge, Mr President? Well, better watch your back!

More recently we have also heard from prominent neo-con William Kristol, co-founder with Robert Kagan of the ill-famed Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank, which set the stage strategically at the eve of the presidency of Bush jnr., right on cue for the “new Pearl Harbor” attacks of September 11th and the ensuing “Global War of Terror”. 5

On Valentine’s Day, Kristol tweeted:

Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump State.

Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.

This too is more than simply veiled threat. But then, to precisely what is Kristol referring when he eggs on the mysterious forces of the ‘deep state’, so antithetical (to judge from his own words) both to democracy and the US constitution? And to repeat, given the surrounding circumstances, Kristol’s tweet is more than a veiled threat, it is a gloat.

On the following day, The Atlantic magazine published an article asking “Are Deep-State Leakers Defending Democracy or Corroding it?” by David Graham, who correctly says:

[Yet] Schumer’s warning, even if realistic, is chilling: Not only does it raise the possibility of unelected, faceless bureaucrats using classified information to retaliate against a duly elected president, but that comes in the wake of the intelligence scandals of the Obama years. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed the vast powers that the NSA had accrued and could use, even on American citizens, with little or no oversight.

Further down this same piece, Graham then poses that weightier question: exactly what is the nature of this network of influence known as the ‘deep state’ which is suddenly flexing its muscles rather openly. Omer Taspinar, one of his respondents and a fellow at the well-connected Brookings Institute, supplies this eye-opening description:

His alarming portrait actually pertains to the Turkish ‘deep state’; and this, according to Taspinar, is ‘something different’. Indeed, notwithstanding Turkey is one of the West’s key allies with the second largest military force in the Nato bloc, it is basically an open secret that factions within the top echelons of its state institutions and military agencies engage in covert criminal activities on a regular basis: whether in the dirty war against Kurdish separatists and other regime opponents or, conversely, with intent to undermine President Erdogen and his government.

That ISIS and related Islamist terrorists have, for instance, been allowed free passage back and forth across the Turkish-Syrian border is a well-established fact and cannot be contested. Then, last July the world witnessed a dramatic but failed coup attempt which Erdogen blamed on the cultish CIA-backed fifth column ‘Gülen movement’. Evidently there is a great deal bubbling beneath the surface in Turkish ‘deep state’ politics. Indeed, if you type ‘deep state’ into google you will find myriad links to ‘Turkish deep state’; Turkey being the byword for ‘deep state’.

Back across the Bosphorus, on the other hand, we generally put more trust in the sanctity of our western democracies which we hope are better protected by constitutional systems of checks and balances. Nevertheless, criminal collusion certainly does take place at the highest levels of our society. Two of the plainest recent examples worth citing are Iran-Contra in America and the murderous hoax surrounding Iraqi WMDs. This second involved collusion between agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Such high-level conspiracies in our own systems are of course pigeonholed as aberrations, ‘lapses’ or ‘failures’, and thereafter fitted with a label that designates them as exceptional: words such as ‘scandal’ and ‘-gate’. Tags now attached to some of the most ludicrous tittle-tattle and rumour, with the inevitable knock-on effect that the serious is conflated with the trivial, and the truth with fakery.

Moreover, when demonstrative evidence arises of continuity between conspirators, as periodically it does (see the two examples given below), this more damning proof of a wider high-level conspiracy tends, for obvious reasons, only to come to light many years or even decades after the event. Revelations of this kind are thereupon relegated to the position of interesting historic footnotes, rather than more properly treated as indicative and thus relevant to our understanding of contemporary events.

Hence, the flagrant and criminal lies that served as the pretext for war against Iraq were mostly overlooked during the commensurate push for regime change in Libya less than a decade on. And while nearly every schoolboy can repeat the name of Watergate (even if they don’t know the details) very few people know much, if anything at all, about the terroristic activities of ‘informants’ such as Stakeknife during “the troubles” in Ireland, or can name the clandestine and ‘stay-back’ operation ‘Gladio’ and its involvement throughout the 1970s and into the early ’80s in a Europewide “Strategy of Tension”.

Here is a short extract from a Guardian report published in 2003 about British agent ‘Stakeknife’ who it is alleged is guilty of at least forty IRA murders:

Yesterday, as west Belfast reeled from the news that Scappaticci and the British army agent known as Stakeknife were one and the same, an IRA source said: “He was the bogeyman of the IRA: judge, jury and executioner. He didn’t have to attend brigade meetings. He didn’t get involved in the politics or talking. But whenever something went wrong, Freddy Scappaticci was sent for.”

But this man, entrusted by the IRA army council with a crucial role, was in fact the British army’s most precious asset at the heart of the republican movement for a quarter of a century. 7

Click here to read the full article entitled “He did the IRA’s dirty work for 25 years – and was paid £80,000 a year by the government”.

Revelations about ‘Stakeknife’ and thousands of other ‘informants’ involved in Ulster terrorist gangs came to light thanks to reports by the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir John Stevens, following his three inquiries that spanned 14 years. In the final report Stevens finds that collusion between the security services and loyalist paramilitaries prolonged the Troubles and that “one branch of military intelligence was out of control and its activities were disastrous.” 8

At the time of the report’s release, Stevens said:

“My inquiries have highlighted collusion, ranging from the wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved in murder.” 9

And below is embedded arguably the single most illuminating investigative documentary ever broadcast by the BBC – so important that I have already included it within earlier posts – a three-part Timewatch series from 1992 entitled simply Gladio in which filmmaker Allan Francovich goes on an extraordinary trail in efforts to interview key suspects and piece together the involvement of Nato, the CIA and British intelligence, and their collusion with ultra-right militia and other fascist groups including the Propaganda Due (P2) lodge in Italy:

These are the words of right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is one of many to testify in the film:

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”

We must not be naïve. In reality, wherever political power is concentrated, there is always intrigue and plots of different kinds – though not all will be illicit. Beyond the more regularly reported machinations hatched within our local councils, county halls and regional police forces, there will be grander schemes forged at the rarefied heights of Cabinet, Whitehall, inside the Beltway and (heaven forfend) the inner circles of western security services.

‘Affairs’ such as Iran-Contra or so-called ‘failures’ like the Iraqi WMD hoax appear as singular irregularities simply by virtue of being so intimately exposed: other top-level conspiracies will soon become submerged when the “establishment” closes ranks. For instance, do you remember the name of Adam Werritty…? Look him up here and here and here.

Or consider, as a more immediate example, the ongoing VIP child abuse ‘scandal’. One moment it was making headline news, but then with an official inquiry underway (setting up inquiries as a tactic for delaying and covering tracks has an exceedingly long history – the Stevens Inquiry is the exception not the rule), public attention was switched from the original allegations toward some who were making the accusations. Presumption of innocence is a legal right, of course; a vital one that protects our freedom. So the burden of proof is always on the prosecution. But it is surely noteworthy that whilst some of our minor celebrities have been recently tried and jailed following police investigations into child abuse, none of the senior politicians or peers who came under similar suspicion has yet faced prosecution. But then ‘establishment’ and ‘cover up’ are words that fit together a lot like ‘Turkish’ and ‘deep state’.

Here is what senior Tory whip, Tim Fortescue, who had served in Sir Edward Heath’s government, told the BBC documentary “Westminster’s Secret Service” back in 1995:

“For anyone with any sense, who was in trouble, would come to the whips and tell them the truth, and say now, I’m in a jam, can you help?

“It might be debt, it might be… a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal in which a member seemed likely to be mixed up in – they’d come and ask if we could help and if we could, we did.

“And we would do everything we can because we would store up brownie points… and if I mean, that sounds a pretty, pretty nasty reason, but it’s one of the reasons because if we could get a chap out of trouble then, he will do as we ask forever more.”

We might also recollect the sordid cases of Sir Jimmy Savile, and still more pertinently of Liberal MP, Sir Cyril Smith, who each abused literally hundreds of victims but escaped prosecution because repeated allegations made against them were only posthumously believed. It has since been disclosed that a thick dossier of police evidence on Cyril Smith was seized and deliberately held back by British intelligence immediately after he became a cabinet minister.10 Was this procurement by MI5 also ‘exceptional’ or ‘a lapse’, or might we presume that in all likelihood today’s intelligence services hold similar blackmailable dossiers on numerous prominent MPs?

Now let’s return to America and to the overarching question of how the term ‘deep state’ applies there. For the American ‘deep state’ is as irrefutably real (whether ‘something different’ or not) as its counterpart in Turkey, and large parts of it are not even particularly hard to locate:

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

So writes Mike Lofgren in a short essay entitled “Anatomy of the Deep State”.

A congressional staff member for 28 years who specialised in national security and had top secret security clearance, Lofgren was by his own account “at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition.” But then, as he goes on to describe, “psychological disposition” is not nearly as important as it might seem. Indeed, it is not at all necessary for insiders to be deeply committed to any greater cause:

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Still more instructively, Lofgren expounds (and at some length) how the ‘deep state’ is far less statelike than it sounds:

[T]he Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings. 11

Click here for the whole piece which reads like a who’s who of corporate insiders.

Incidentally, it follows that the ‘free press’, itself a loose conglomeration of competing corporate entities, although comparatively unfettered when interrogating the ‘deep state’ influence within Turkey or elsewhere, shies away from similar scrutiny at home. Indeed shares in what is, in effect, an article of faith that nothing remotely comparable to the Turkish ‘deep state’ exists or operates anywhere within boundaries of the West, whether in America or Britain, or any of our close European neighbours.

This in turn partly accounts for why neither William Kristol nor Chuck Schumer has been taken task following such staggeringly anti-democratic outbursts. The presumption being that similar admissions and innuendos are founded upon half truths at best; and having developed such a remarkable aptitude for doublethink, the media thus maintains, being half-convinced, that although the American ‘deep state’ exists and operates as a powerful political actor, the effects of its actions are of no tremendous importance. In any case, ignorance is bliss for journalists too, and extending Mike Lofgren’s other point, they also have their careers to consider.

In fairness, there are a few journalists who now feel sufficiently emboldened to shirk this general rule. Glenn Greenwald is one and when interviewed recently by Democracy Now!, he offered a quite alternative take on the huge importance of this sudden eruption of the American ‘deep state’ as it looms into fuller view. But first he outlined what he understands by the altogether slippery term ‘deep state’:

The deep state, although there’s no precise or scientific definition, generally refers to the agencies in Washington that are permanent power factions. They stay and exercise power even as presidents who are elected come and go. They typically exercise their power in secret, in the dark, and so they’re barely subject to democratic accountability, if they’re subject to it at all. It’s agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world’s worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads. This is who not just people like Bill Kristol, but lots of Democrats are placing their faith in, are trying to empower, are cheering for as they exert power separate and apart from—in fact, in opposition to—the political officials to whom they’re supposed to be subordinate.

Greenwald continues:

Now, I happen to think that the Trump presidency is extremely dangerous. You just listed off in your news—in your newscast that led the show, many reasons. They want to dismantle the environment. They want to eliminate the safety net. They want to empower billionaires. They want to enact bigoted policies against Muslims and immigrants and so many others. And it is important to resist them. And there are lots of really great ways to resist them, such as getting courts to restrain them, citizen activism and, most important of all, having the Democratic Party engage in self-critique to ask itself how it can be a more effective political force in the United States after it has collapsed on all levels. That isn’t what this resistance is now doing.

What they’re doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that. Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving.

But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. That is a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it. And yet that’s what so many, not just neocons, but the neocons’ allies in the Democratic Party, are now urging and cheering. And it’s incredibly warped and dangerous to watch them do that.

Click here to read the full transcript or watch the interview on the Democracy Now! website.

Prior to Trump’s inauguration, I do not recall any focussed mainstream attention on the American ‘deep state’ and virtually no acknowledgment whatsoever of the decisive role it plays in shaping policy and otherwise pulling strings in Washington. Talk of ‘deep state’ politics anywhere in the West was almost entirely the preserve of ‘conspiracy theorists’. A few weeks into his foundering presidency, however, and ‘deep state’ insider and editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, is loudly singing hallelujahs to its praise.

Lofgren concludes his essay optimistically:

The Snowden revelations (the impact of which have been surprisingly strong), the derailed drive for military intervention in Syria and a fractious Congress, whose dysfunction has begun to be a serious inconvenience to the Deep State, show that there is now a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change. What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.

Trump is very evidently not that figure of “serene self-confidence” presaged in Lofgren’s remarks. Some interesting news, however, is that Trump’s presidency appears to have clumsily opened a rift between the White House and that “hybrid entity of public and private institutions” called the ‘deep state’ or ‘shadow government’. Not that Trump is anti-establishment. He is unshakeably a part of the establishment, although the establishment is not as monolithic as many believe. And in some areas the new administration’s policies seem to be seriously testing divisions between the competing establishment factions.

In the ensuing struggle between the ‘deep state’ and ‘Trump state’, as Kristol succinctly puts it, we are getting a momentary glimpse at the power/s behind the throne. But be warned because just as the cloak of invisibility begins to slip a little, so the ‘deep state’ in turn becomes not only more vulnerable but also more dangerous.

And it is actually not in our interests to take sides here, other than in seeking to oppose any continued escalation in already heightened tensions between America and Russia, since this presents a terrible risk to the survival of our civilisation and serves only to benefit the special interest groups. Aside from challenging this renewed threat of a Cold War, however, it is surely wise to distance ourselves and not lend our support to either camp. The rightful stance must surely be: a pox on both your houses!

Returning to Mike Whitney’s piece, he concludes:

[I]f you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas. Leftists should avoid the temptation of aligning themselves with groups and agencies that might help them achieve their short-term goal of removing Trump, but ultimately move them closer to a de facto 1984 lock-down police state. Misplaced support for the deep state Russophobes will only strengthen the national security state’s stranglehold on power. That’s not a path to victory, it’s a path to annihilation. 12

*

Additional: Gary Webb, the ‘Dark Alliance’ and Pablo Escobar’s son

In the mid-’90s investigative journalist Gary Webb began writing a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News called “Dark Alliance” in which he exposed details of a conspiracy involving CIA protection provided to Contra rebels known to be running cocaine in Nicaragua. He also alleged that the CIA had supported a Los Angeles drug ring and thereby helped to trigger the crack epidemic of the 1980s. In response, The New York Times, The Washington Post and, most especially, The Los Angeles Times attacked him and forced his resignation from the Mercury News.

In 1998, a CIA inspector general’s report acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drugrunners while supporting the contras. A Senator named John Kerry had investigated these links years earlier, and the media had mostly ignored his findings. After Webb published his articles, the media spent more time crushing Webb than pursuing the full story. It is only because of Webb’s work–as flawed as it was–that the CIA IG inquiry happened. So, then, it is only because of Webb that US citizens have confirmation from the CIA that it partnered up with suspected drug traffickers in the just-say-no years and that the Reagan Administration, consumed with a desire to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, allied itself with drug thugs.*

In 2014 Gary Webb received an even higher accolade when his story was made into the Hollywood film, Kill the Messenger.

Whilst with regards to media criticism, Webb later wrote:

If we had met five years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me… And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job… The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress…†

Tragically, on December 10th 2004, Webb was found dead with two gunshot wounds to the head. His death was ruled suicide by the Sacramento County coroner’s office.

*

Today we have fresh allegations of CIA involvement in drug-running. The following extract is taken from an article published on February 17th. So far it seems to have received no mainstream attention:

Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, son of notorious Medellín cartel drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, now says his father “worked for the CIA.”

In a new book, “Pablo Escobar In Fraganti,” Escobar, who lives under the pseudonym, Juan Sebastián Marroquín, explains his “father worked for the CIA selling cocaine to finance the fight against Communism in Central America.”

“The drug business is very different than what we dreamed,” he continues. “What the CIA was doing was buying the controls to get the drug into their country and getting a wonderful deal.”

“He did not make the money alone,” Marroquín elaborated in an interview, “but with US agencies that allowed him access to this money. He had direct relations with the CIA.”

Notably, Marroquín added, “the person who sold the most drugs to the CIA was Pablo Escobar.”

A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies. Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.